thumb|right|Front View of the Peralta Stones
thumb|right|Front Back of the Peralta Stones
The Peralta Stones are a set of engraved stones supposedly indicating the location of the Lost Dutchman's Gold Mine, in Arizona, United States. The "Dutchman" was actually a German immigrant named Jacob Waltz ().
The story goes that the stones are named for an obscure "Peralta family", supposedly an old and powerful Mexican family. Some people named Peralta owned a cattle ranch that included what is now Oakland, California at the time of the Mexican–American War. Another Peralta, Pedro de Peralta, was the governor of the Spanish territory in New Mexico, and picked the site for Santa Fe. Nevertheless, the Peralta surname is common in Spain and Mexico, and it became associated with the "Peralta" mine by James Reavis. Reavis popularized the idea of a rich Peralta family in Arizona in 1882 when he tried to assert a phony Peralta Spanish land grant which included a huge swath of Arizona and New Mexico, including the Superstition Mountains. His forged Peralta genealogy was exposed, and he served a prison sentence for fraud. According to current legend, but not supported by the historical record, some Peraltas mined in the Superstition Mountains. The first written reference to a “Peralta mine” in the Superstitions was in 1895, by writer Pierpont C. Bicknell. in 1956 (one source says 1952, another 1949
Treasure map
thumb|right|Aerial Photo of ‘Noto Triangulum’ of the Latin Heart
thumb|left| Latin Heart Axis
thumb|right|Latin Heart: Fornix (Arch)
thumb|right|Latin Heart Peralta gold mine: mesothermal quartz vein with gold ore
thumb|left|Table of GPS Coordinates of the 18 Peralta Stone Map Posts.
According to local lore, the stones contain a map indicating the location of the Lost Dutchman's Gold Mine. Various claims have been made about the location of the gold mine based on an interpretation of the stones, and such claims appear at regular intervals—though no one has yet recovered a flake of Jacob Waltz's gold.
Danny Adams, in 2005, read the map as a coded message and claims the stones were made by Ted DeGrazia, a painter and art collector rumored to have burned (or buried) a collection of art worth $5 million rather than pay taxes on his property; Adams claims one of the stones reads "Be ready boy, are on a map on Arizona county scale, scale map" and aided by numerological analysis locates the mine in Upper Labarge Canyon. The treasure of paintings, supposedly hidden in the mine, is also connected, somehow, to a conspiracy of 50 businessmen from the Phoenix area to hide DeGrazia's work.
In 2007, William and Michael Johnson (originally from Massachusetts) said that they had identified a privately owned cave as the mine, based on the clues left in the Peralta Stones.
Location
The Peralta Stones were held at the Arizona Museum of Natural History, 53 N. Macdonald, in Mesa, Arizona, previously known as the Mesa Southwest Museum. In June 2009, they were to go on extended display at the Superstition Mountain Museum, 4087 N. Apache Trail, in Apache Junction, Arizona.